This is pretty low Intel, you should know better than to waist your time on this. What do you hope to acomplish? You know that you can't get rid of AMD and to try and starve them out by a lengthy patent dispute seems highly unlikely. this is truely an epic waist of time and resources. you should focus more on the current EU anti trust issues you are facing.

Intel is trying ot burn a lot of bridges recently what with Nvidia and AMD. In this time of financial uncertantly it is better to have friends in the industry than to be the bully on the street.

Probably it's because Intel has a very commanding lead with core i7 and atom. They've recovered from the Pentium4 fiasco and with the new architecture they feel they are in a position to own the market again.

What they may find is that they make awaken the ire of government(s) who may view this all as a monopoly grab.

Personally what intel is doing doesn't bother me so much. I'd really like to see their patent porfolio decimated (as most patents should be) to allow real valid competition back into the market -- not just AMD and VIA.

Id really hope to see some revolutionary new cpu technology become available which would change all the rules. But that has to happen on its own.

Probably it's because Intel has a very commanding lead with core i7 and atom. They've recovered from the Pentium4 fiasco and with the new architecture they feel they are in a position to own the market again.

It's not just Pentium 4 but the Itanium in particular that they have had to recover from, and amusingly that was done by going in several directions and using technology that was very similar to what AMD was doing. The x64 extensions that Intel came up with, for example, are a blatant rip-off of how AMD chose to do 64-bit.

Seriously, I would keep quiet if I were Intel. The cross-license agreement was done so that a hornet's nest would not be stirred up, and it at least ensured that Intel's 'right' to 'license' the concept of the x86 architecture to people would not be questioned any time soon. Mind you, they're caught between a rock and a hard place because they need to be seen to be enforcing it......

Maybe all this was just inevitable anyway? It would certainly please nVidia, amongst others, if this were to blow up nicely.